The Importance of -tion

Whenever I get talking to a teacher about spelling, I offer them my brilliant idea that every school should, in the first couple of weeks of the first term, have a “-tion Day” when each first year student and teacher will adopt a useful word ending in -tion. By the end of the day they will know what it means, how to say it naturally, say it for spelling, and, of course, spell it accurately.

I always end that conversation by saying something like, “I know there are other ways to spell the “shun” ending but -tion is by far the most common. I’ve been making that assertion based on experience rather than research so thought I’d dig a little deeper to back up my claims.

If you like words or at least like finding word patterns, then you probably know morewords.com. I usually get to it by searching for something like “words ending in” or “words with” and up it pops. This time it returned thousands of words ending -ion and arranged in order from most to least frequent. I scooped off the 720 most common, put them in alphabetical order and sorted them by <tion>, <sion>, <ssion>, <cion> and all the rest.

Without looking at the photo at the end of this post, what percentage of those 720 words do you think has the <tion> spelling? I was shocked, but it certainly backed up my gut feeling that, if every student coming into high school could spell -tion without thinking, then they would have mastered a whole lot of curriculum words without even trying. (They can also make up marvellous words like planification, as demonstrated by the instructions from my Air Transat app.)

Here’s a selection from the S section. Note that the spellings of individual sounds are mostly those learned very early on in school. In most words, each sound has only one symbol to represent it except for <ph>, <ar>, <or> , <ci>, <er> and <pp>. There aren’t even many unstressed vowels.

Reviews

I am an Educational Psychologist and…I think the programme is excellent. I love the way it blends good solid literacy skills with advice for how to mediate pupils’ emotional responses to their past reading difficulties.

The Educational Psychologist

Overheard explaining to the SENCO what’s different about TRT:
I’ll tell you what’s different! They’re not making me memorize lists of baby words. I can spell (writes on board) condition, I can spell conditioner, I can spell conditioned, I can spell conditioning.

The Year 8

I didn’t think That Reading Thing would go this well. I was a bit nervous. I didn’t think I’d be able to get to read this fast. – Tony aged 20

The Young Adult

From his executive summary: Average progress was 3½ times the standard rate, and certainly significant both educationally and in terms of life chances for most of the young people who participated.
From his observations of teaching sessions: Overall, I was very impressed by the clear evidence that the students were learning quite rapidly, and by the skills and professionalism of the tutors.Too often there is a noticeable gap between how a scheme’s deviser intends it to be implemented and trains teachers to deliver it, on the one hand, and the enacting of it in practice on the other – but there was barely any difference between the intentions Tricia Millar stated at the South Woodford training and what I observed in Bow and Handsworth.
– Greg Brooks, Emeritus professor of education, University of Sheffield, an honorary life member and past president of the UK Literacy

The Academic

I’d been struggling for some time to find appropriate materials to use with a learner in her forties who has always struggled with reading and spelling. There’s lots of phonics stuff out there but most of it is far too childish to use with adults. The TRT scheme is fantastic and just what I needed. We have only been doing this for 4 weeks but already my learner’s confidence has increased enormously and I am amazed at the progress she is making. There’s a real sense of achievement at the end of each lesson. I was recently observed by my SpLD tutor and received a glowing report for the approach I was taking, particularly the fact that I was encouraging the learner to say all the sounds out loud all the time.

The Adult Literacy Tutor

When I referred M to TRT in September, he lacked confidence in his abilities, was not keen on reading and had a fairly low level of literacy. Since then, he has made great progress both in the skills he has gained and in his attitude. He is engaging more, asking questions, bringing in papers from the mosque which interest him, reading complex texts, has taken a book home to read, comprehending what he is reading, responding to texts, has become more focused with greater stamina, is more punctual. He has reached Level 30.

The Teacher

I had my first meeting with a Year 10 young woman in a school last week. When doing the assessment, she got to the fourth word (‘temp’) in Level 1 and got stuck. By the end of the session, she was able to spell out the word ‘dentist’ and read the word ‘fantastic’ without any prompting from me. The most amazingly rewarding part of this was the look on her face when she realised what progress she had made in such a short amount of time. Words can’t describe it. My interpretation – TRT Rocks!!!

Have made a start with TRT and the student (reading age of 7:0) really enjoyed it – it took me a while to find my rhythm but hopefully it’ll be easier 2nd lesson! My original dyslexia training was over 3 years ago and I’m quite rusty so it’s lovely to have a structure for me to follow as it’s a massive time saver. The learner was amazed she could spell and read admit and fantastic in the first 40 minutes.

The PRU SENCO

Thank you, Tricia, for such fantastic support almost a year after I purchased TRT. I don’t have many 12+ pupils so to find the support still available is marvellous. I think TRT is the best value for money resource I have bought.

The Dyslexia Specialist Tutor

Tricia Millar is the developer of
That Reading Thing & That Spelling Thing.
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